Slideshow: Facebook Calls for Cold Flash

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Facebook called for a new class of dense but low-cost flash chips to store a rising flood of digital photos and data in a keynote at the Flash Memory Summit here. A datacenter manager also gave insights into how the company organizes its computer systems and processes its traffic.

The flash industry has focused on driving ever higher write endurance and performance. But a relatively low endurance, poor performance chip would better server Facebook's need to store some 350 million new photos a day, said Jason Taylor, director of infrastructure at Facebook. Other solid-state technologies could work for the so-called "cold flash," he added.

"Make the worst flash possible -- just make it dense and cheap," Taylor said, noting the social networking giant aims to lower the $1.24 billion it spent last year building and provisioning datacenters.

Long-writes, "like 10x as long as usual," do not matter, he said. Likewise, low endurance and lower I/O operations per terabyte are also OK for Facebook's uses. Many of the 240 billion photos the social networking giant stores are "data written once and read never," he quipped.

In an email exchange with EE Times after the keynote, Taylor tried to quantify the opportunity:

An IDC report at the end of last year estimated that 2.8 zettabytes of data were stored in 2012. This amount is projected to grow to 40 zettabytes (1 zettabytes = 1 billion terabytes) by 2020. We believe that a huge percentage of that data will be written once and read rarely, if ever. Given that only a small percentage of data is stored in flash today, we see a massive opportunity for dense cold flash storage over the next few years.

He declined to provide any specifics on Facebook's discussions with flash vendors about the product concept. "We've talked with people in the flash chip industry, and they have been excited about the engineering challenge presented by cold flash."

On the following pages are some slides from Taylor's presentation at the show, showing a broader picture of how Facebook configures its systems and handles traffic.

Write once, read never...maybe? Seems all about power savings. Having to spin up a drive or keep an array up for an unlikely access seems unattractive, however, the read latency for the cold flash would only need to be on par with HDD access times. To the extent that the MTBF of HDDs is a function of simply being powered and spinning, cold flash could increase longevity if it remained unpowered except in the rare ocassion where access was necessary.

I chose it because they have a good reputation and support. Western Digital and Netgear have similar products but only trial SW bundled (last I checked). Mine's been running over 2 years without a hitch and is set up with 2 hard drives and what they call RAID 1 which means each hard drive is a mirror of the other so if one fails you can replace it and not lose anything.

I do hope this changes the industr. Facebook is an industry of itself. So markets can react to take advantage of this clear need. I think in the near future, storage will be a huge business area. Everyone must be ready for it as we generate these tons of data.

I think the leadership team of Facebook is becoming business savvy and forcing on profit. The excitement is over and they realize the there is competition out there. Therefore, they realize that they need to cut cost and still maintain good service. This is very smart.

how much space or power on a flash chip is actually dedicated to the block-erase process? if flash were simplified to a be a purely write-once media, would it really change the power or density pictures? I'm not sure the argument even stands if it's only directed at packaging: flash systems need a lot of channels to produce decent write speeds, even in the absence of overwrite (erase).

afaikt, the only thing that would change is that flash controllers could become dumber/smaller/cooler.

For a modest fee you can buy an internet appliance that has an integrated web server and can hold all of your photos and you and your friends can access them any time and you don't have to worry about FBook not caring

The space shuttle was just such an airliner, I read an article that said that without the 3 flight computers it couldn't be flown. Another examplke is the FA18 that is aerodynamically unstable. This allows it to do high speed manouevers because it does them naturally but I digress